Home is where the heart is? by Ilse Crawford

I am currently reading and visually savouring this beautiful book by Ilse Crawford.

“Home is where the heart is?” amounts to food for the soul…

From the inside cover: “Home is where the heart is? … looks beyond the pure aesthetics to pursue a philosophy of reclaiming and reintegrating the human element into our homes. With the premise that ‘the more virtual our world becomes, the more we need the physical’, Crawford investigates our basic drive for survival and our more hman, emotional needs for safety, love, respect and self-fulfilments and then explores how, given this understanding, we can improve our lives, our homes and our daily activities.

As she writes in her introductory essay, ‘What are the basic building blocks of behaviour that make us alike? What drives us as human beings? … We need a space that speaks to us both rationally and emotionally. For although we expect our homes to function in many ways today, we also want them to feel more human, more like us.'”

The book contains the most delicious images, text that is relevant to how we seek to live our lives by designing the lives we want to live through the spaces we create to live in, and quotes which demand contemplation:

“For our house is our corner of the world… It is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word” – Gaston Bachelard

“How can you say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten? – Logan Pearsall Smith

“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations” – Oscar Wilde

I could go on re-typing these quotes and spruiking about this book, but instead, suggest you visit your good, local bookshop and buy a copy!

This is a beautiful book!
The feel, the weight and the content: a reminder of why we do.
‘Detail’ excellent and bibliography such a good resource for essences esp. Bachelard’s ‘Poetics of Space’.
CMW is back from the wilderness.